To see Sana’a’s Old City for the first time is like “a vision of a childhood dream world of fantasy castles,” a visitor once remarked, but official neglect and unruly construction are threatening to destroy that magic. UNESCO has even threatened to remove the city from the World Heritage List.

They lived in well-planned cities, made exquisite jewelry, and enjoyed the ancient world’s best plumbing. But the people of the sophisticated Indus civilization—remain mysterious, though recent research may have uncovered evidence of matrilocality and surprising levels of violence.

During routine archaeological research as part of the Ancient Egypt Leatherwork Project (AELP) carried out by Salima Ikram, Professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo (AUC) and Andre Veldmeijer, head of the Egyptology section at the Netherlands Flemish Institute in Cairo, a collection of 300 leather fragments of an Old Kingdom chariot were uncovered at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Continue reading →

The minaret of one of Syria’s most famous mosques has been destroyed during clashes in the northern city of Aleppo. The state news agency Sana accused rebels of blowing up the 11th-Century minaret of the Umayyad Mosque. However, activists say the minaret was hit by Syrian army tank fire.

The builders of the famous Giza pyramids in Egypt feasted on food from a massive catering-type operation, the remains of which scientists have discovered at a workers’ town near the pyramids.

Sounding like the plot from a science fiction novel, a robot has discovered three burial chambers under one of the main temples at the archaeological site of Teotihuacan. The ancient city is about 31 miles northeast of Mexico City and estimated to be over 2,000 years old. Continue reading →

A new language dating back to the Scottish Iron Age has been identified on carved stones. These inscriptions are believed to belong to the early Pict society living from ca 300 to 843 AD, in modern-day eastern and northern Scotland.

A giant “monumental” stone structure discovered beneath the waters of the Sea of Galilee in Israel has archaeologists puzzled as to its purpose and even how long ago it was built.

The rise of crowdfunding has taken another step forward as UK-based DigVentures launches the world’s first archaeology crowdfunding platform in response to the dwindling of traditional sources of funding for archaeology. Continue reading →

Egyptian blue, the world’s oldest artificial pigment, could be put to a range of modern uses from medical imaging devices to remote controls for televisions, newly-published research says.

Research by Hendrik Bruins suggests people in the Negev highlands practiced agriculture as long ago as 5000 B.C.E. This is thousands of years earlier than researchers previously thought.

Stone tools unearthed at a Brazilian rock-shelter may date to as early as 22,000 years ago. Their discovery has contributed to the debate about whether ancient people reached the Americas long before the famed Clovis hunters 13,000 years ago. Continue reading →

It’s snowy again in Boston, but here’s some news from a lot of places less icy.

Recent archaeological discoveries on the Arabian Peninsula have uncovered evidence of a previously unknown culture based in the now arid areas in the middle of the desert. The artefacts unearthed are providing proof of a society that flourished thousands of years ago and could push back the domestication dates for horses by thousands of years.

A remarkable find from 2011 of a 33,000 year old dog from a cave in the Siberian Altai mountains showed evidence of dog domestication, the earliest ever found. Now DNA sequencing has proven the remains to be more closely linked to modern dogs than wolves, and one of the growing number of early dogs.

Over the past seven years, around 1,500 antiques—including coins, and pre-Islamic stone carvings—have been confiscated at Sana’a International Airport. Smugglers have been tucking these ancient artifacts inside clothing and hiding them in bags, hoping to sell them abroad, but now they’re being turned over to the National Museum. Continue reading →

Six different Israeli ministries invested nearly $2 million to repair damage, much of it irreversible, after unknown vandals in October 2009 assaulted the site of Avdat, designated by UNESCO (United Nations Science and Culture Organization) as a world’s cultural heritage.

The preservationists of Timbuktu’s centuries-old artifacts have been holding their breath for weeks, waiting for the moment when the French military would seize back Mali’s ancient northern capital from the Islamic militants who have occupied it for 10 months. Now that that’s happened it still isn’t clear how many of the city’s historic manuscripts have survived, but most of them may be safely hidden away.

A recent study of pottery remains from Indus valley sites shows that the origins of curry are a lot older than most people think in this article about the development of curry. Continue reading →

The archaeological archive of Israel, which is administered by the Israel Antiquities Authority and amasses data on all of the activity of the archaeological entities in the country, is being digitized and will go online in the coming days. This is being underwritten with joint funding provided by the Landmarks heritage program in the Prime Minister’s Office and the Israel Antiquities Authority.

The Tomb of the Shroud is a first-century C.E. tomb discovered in Akeldama, Jerusalem, Israel that had been illegally entered and looted. Now testing has been done: genetic analysis of the bioarchaeological remains from the tomb using mitochondrial DNA to examine familial relationships of the individuals within the tomb and molecular screening for the presence of disease. Continue reading →

Archaeologists who have completed the excavation of a 900-seat arts center under one of Rome’s busiest roundabouts are calling it the most important Roman discovery in 80 years.

A temple and sacred vessels from Biblical times have been discovered at Tel Motza. The finds, dated to the early monarchic period and including pottery figurines of men and horses, provide rare testimony of a ritual cult in the Jerusalem region at the beginning of the period of the monarchy.

Some marine archaeologists think ancient artifacts resembling the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient bronze clockwork astronomical calculator, may rest amid the larger-than-expected Roman shipwreck that yielded the device in 1901. Continue reading →

Fragment of an Abbasid Quran, showing geometric ornamentation. Probably written in the ninth century. (Cambridge University Library)

The Cambridge Digital Library has just made available thousands of pages from fragile religious manuscripts for Internet users’ perusal, including a 2,000-year-old copy of the Ten Commandments, known as the “Nash Papyrus.”

New CT scans of Ramessess III show that his throat was slit, solving an ancient mystery. Additional test also indicate an unidentified mummy may be his disgraced son.

Thousands of fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls went online Tuesday with the launch of a new website by Google and the Israel Antiquities Authority, part of a move to make the famed manuscripts easily available to scholars and casual web surfers. Continue reading →